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Nightrain
For All Nails #158: Nightrain by Walter R. Strapps (with thanks to Noel Maurer) ---- :Excerpt from Chapter 15 of :Total War - The History and Battles of the Global War, 1939-1948 (New York, November 1974) :Chapter 15: Supplying War German Chancellor Karl Bruning FN1 could not have been a happy man by the time 1943 rolled around. By that point he must have realised that the military successes of the German armed forces had reached their apogee and were beginning to decline. Many different authors have cited innumerable different reasons for this reversal of fortune, some focusing on the loss of morale that accompanied defeats, some the length of the war and the effect that had on morale, others on improved military doctrine of Germany's opponents and, in at least one infamous work, on the peptic ulcers suffered by the German Chancellor. But this author believes that more than anything else the German war effort began to fail for a very simple reason with a very complex set of circumstances: supplies. While it is unarguable that Germany was able to generate sufficient supplies for its armies in the field and for its people at home, it was patently unable to actually get those supplies to its troops. The question as to why this is the case can probably be answered in a dozen different ways, but this author believes that it comes down to a single answer: trains. The Germans simply lacked the trains, the train cars, and the train tracks to supply armies as far away as India and deep into Europe. A single bomb from a British airmobile, or a single charge placed by a Pushtun tribesman would disrupt the supplies to the German armies for days. The proof of this thesis can perhaps be seen most clearly in the extremely effective resistance that the Germans were able to erect in close proximity to the Reich, a resistance which dropped off exponentially with distance from the Fatherland. Why would the Germans have chosen rail as the method by which they supplied their troops? This is a virtually rhetorical question. They used rail as they had no other method of doing so. Terramobiles, even the Vorstadtangriffträger (VsAnTg) class, simply could not make the trip in a manner which was timely, nor one that consumed fewer supplies than were carried by the vehicle itself. Not that this wasn't attempted of course. To date, there are 31,567 men officially reported as missing in action along the German-India and German-Ottoman supply routes. ... Yet again, we are brought back to the technological attempts by the Germans to bridge gaps in their war effort by skipping the entire effective testing phase. Perhaps this could have been addressed in Chapter 12, but as it directly pertains to supply, it is included here. The 'rocket trains' the Germans used on the Asian rail-lines in an attempt to speed up supply along the woefully inadequate in number rail-lines through this region were not a catastrophic failure, but they were a waste of resources which could have been spent better elsewhere. Though, at the same time, one could make that argument about the entire Asian adventure the Germans embarked upon. The engines of the 'rocket trains' were equipped with single burst rockets which were to be used to assist the trains in climbing steep grades or in covering flat areas quickly. In practice however, they were viewed by the train engineers as deadly (not without reason) and were rarely, if ever used. ... While Germany had some extremely impressive equipment during the Global War, much of it was lost through simply not being able to move it any longer. Battlemobiles were left sitting by the sides of roads or in fields, completely undamaged but lacking fuel. And this was in spite of there actually being no shortage of any of the types of fuels the Germans needed for their machines. It was simply and only a case of not being able to get the fuel, and the battlemobiles to the same place at the same time. Belinger (1972) has estimated that 2,567 battlemobiles were abandoned in the field in a fully recoverable condition during 1943 and 1944 alone. Again, referring to Figure 24, one can see that the further from Germany the armies were, the higher losses of equipment they suffered. While this may be partly the result of harder fighting, it is more likely that commanders simply listed as irreparably damaged or destroyed battlemobiles which were simply unable to move for lack of fuel. This is supported by the observations of General Hasting Alexander of the 4th Indian Army, writing in 1946: "The entire 5th Armoured Brigade is equipped with German battlemobiles captured or claimed after being abandoned. In number, they are equipped with 127 Class Fours, 89 Class Fives, 37 Class Sixes and even a trio of Class Seven heavy battlemobiles. The quartermaster of that Brigade reports that ninety percent of these battlemobiles had nothing more than cosmetic damage when salvaged." This anecdote makes clear that the Germans had outstripped their supply lines, not by tens of miles or even hundreds of miles, but in fact thousands of miles. A clear case of one's eyes being larger than one's stomach, this author thinks. As one might imagine, the transport of battlemobiles to the various islands of Southest Asia for use in invasion of these areas suffered from similar problems in lack of supply, serving to equip their opponents with weapons. ---- Forward to FAN #159: Weakness is Strength. Forward to 2 November 1974: November Election. Return to For All Nails. Category: Global War